Views from the Store

Matthew’s Blog – A Busy Week

Day 1 – Work Experience Guy

We’ve got a new addition to the Apprentice Store, Airan Mackenzie! He’s going to be with us for 8 weeks and he’s writing a blog of his own. So, the first part of today was mainly spent trying to figure out what to do with these two routers David had found us. After a bit of trial and error we finally connected to them only to be prompted with “WARNING: SOMETHING SOMETHING BT EQUIPMENT!!!” so the investigation of the routers stopped there. In the afternoon we headed to the UHI to watch some 3rd year degree computing students presentation. Why? Because one of the group’s projects was to design a web application for us. It was an interesting experience and I was highly impressed with the work displayed.

Day 2 – Preparation

This week me and Airan were going to attend a presentation at the STEM Hub about WiFi hacking. Unfortunately, the lecturers fell ill so now the plan was for us to step in. Thankfully we had a variety of materials to help us and that was what today was all about, studying them. Well I say studying but this presentation was mostly aimed at kids so today was a fun day, mainly spent playing games. Hopefully it had prepared us enough for tomorrow.

Day 3 – The Presentation

We got to the STEM Hub at 9am and were welcomed and accommodated well by the staff there. The room had these huge 56” touch screens which could be synced together, simply seeing this technology had already made the day for me. The first group rolled in and I found that I was actually more nervous talking to a bunch of kids than adults. As time went on we gained experience and confidence and by the end of the day I found myself relaxed, comfortable and fairly happy with my performance. And hey, the Boss paid for our lunch so a big thanks to UHI for having us.

Day 4 – Data Normalisation

Airan showed an interest in development, I did too, simply wanting to see if it was something for me. So, David had set us the task of making an Apprentice Store database for next Friday. First of all, we needed to learn data normalisation. So we took multiple invoices and, well, tried to normalise the data within it. Who would’ve thought a simple invoice could be so difficult to understand? All in all, yet another good week at the Apprentice Store, it’s nice to have some extra company and also a bit of change with going to the college although, no day is ever the same here.